The B.C. Interview

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Peter Molyneux Gets Prehistoric with BC. The Interview

By Aaron Boulding

Peter Molyneux may be the most wanted man in the land of Xbox owners because in addition to Project Ego, in his own words the ultimate RPG, he's working on B.C., one of the most anticipated yet mysterious Xbox games out there. The man behind the award-winning Black & White for the PC has more than a few interesting game ideas at his disposal and with B.C. we're getting Molyneux's take on prehistoric times. Specifically, what it would be like to be a caveman, only you know then what you know now.

For a game that only has one screenshot at this point, B.C. sounds so fleshed out and well designed that you'd think it's only a few weeks from release. The truth is, B.C. is nowhere near completion but that doesn't stop Molyneux from getting excited and repeating his adverbs and adjectives three times for emphasis when making a crucial point about the game.

Intrepid Games is the developer behind B.C. but, as a satellite company of Molyneux's Lionhead Studios, they'll have the full creative support of the man himself. But we're not going to waste your attention with more mindless drivel. Peter Molyneux goes on at length about B.C., so much so that his interview is going to serve as our unofficial preview for this title. Enjoy the words and keep your eyes peeled for those ever-present unofficial announcements.

IGN: We've heard a lot of rumors and speculation about what B.C. is going to be. But we have to ask the most important question right off the bat. Do we get to fight dinosaurs?

Peter Molyneux

: Let me tell you what B.C. is. Basically there's this tribe of people and they're pretty pathetic examples of human beings. Your job in the game is to, by controlling individual members of the tribe, to help them become mankind, basically. What B.C. is going to be is the goriest, the most brutal, the bloodiest game that's ever been. I mean this is a savage, brutal world. This isn't like some kind of Jurassic Park. When you kill a tyrannosaurus rex there is an ocean of blood. There are arms bitten off, there are head bitten off and there are people being squashed. It's is going to push the mature rating of the game. And that's what it is, just savage, savage world this game is being played in. And we'll apply everything we can to it.

IGN: So that's a yes then? Exclusive content made possible by IGN. Intended for premium Insider subscribers only PM: Absolutely. You do get to kill dinosaurs and you get to see entrails and everything. For a start, the dinosaurs you get to kill¿I don't know if you've ever been to a natural history museum and seen how big a tyrannosaurus rex really is. I was pretty disappointed. Y'know I'd imagined skyscraper-tall dinosaurs. So, we've taken a little bit of poetic license on the size of the dinosaurs. They're bigger, they're stronger, they're meaner than anything we've seen in Jurassic Park. They're just big things on an incredible scale.

IGN: B.C. has been described as an arcade game which, upon first thought, doesn't sound like a Peter Molyneux-type title. How do you match that kind of gameplay with this grand concept of making sure humankind makes it through pre-history? Exclusive content made possible by IGN. Intended for premium Insider subscribers only PM: It's an arcade game because the mechanism we've got is really, really, really simple. It's actually terrifyingly simple. What you can do is, grab or take control of one of the characters and more or less tag other members of the tribe and take them with you. So that whatever you do, they'll copy you. So if you start attacking a dinosaur, then all of the tribe members with you will start attacking that dinosaur too. It's a little bit like controlling the power-up system. So if you want to go attack that pack of velociraptors with half of your tribe --which is half of your tribe for the whole game, by the way-- you'll almost certainly win just going in the full force. But you'll start to see how that mechanic really works.

The one and only B.C. related screen in existence.

IGN: That sounds a lot like the mechanism we saw in Pikmin for the GameCube.

PM:

Yes. Actually that gameplay mechanic, that "tagging" will be in B.C. as well as in Black and White: Next Generation (for the Xbox).